Mini-Heap

Links to interesting stuff elsewhere. Several of these would have been the subject of individual posts but it’s summer and I’m trying not to post about everything. Discussion welcome, though.

1. “is this science / is this fantasy / if you have / to ask you’ll / never know said / Louis Armstrong and / that’s pretty convincing…” — “Consciousness Studies,” a poem by Philip Bold. It’s good, and a little funny.
2. “Philosophy, at least some of it, has irreducibly aesthetic aims connected with certain aesthetic emotions” — Barry Lam on the strange tension between analytic philosophy’s self-conception and the judgments of its practitioners
3. “Fanciful examples, competently employed as philosophical tools of persuasion or critical reflection, always have the goal of shaping the beliefs of readers in some specific way” — and that’s the key to defending their use, argue Ian Stoner and Jason Swartwood
4. “That’s not the relationship you want to have between civil society and the military” — Brandon Del Pozo (Brown) and Graham Parsons (formerly West Point) discuss the militarization of federal immigration law enforcement
5. “All of the confusion and misinformation on this issue interferes with my work, because one of the major normative challenges posed by climate change involves thinking about the tradeoffs between the short-term benefits of economic growth and the long-term harms of climate change” — leftwing misinformation about climate change is a problem for environmental philosophy, says Joseph Heath
6. “It will be difficult to separate the deep readers from the superficial ones… Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas” — Joshua Rothman explores various possibilities for how reading will change in the age of AI
7. “Reality is fundamentally good.” But why? — an important question, possibly with everyday implications, and a tangle of different kinds of answers, from Regina Munch

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.
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